The European refugee crisis has been communicated visually through images such as those of Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach, by body bags on the harbor front of Lampedusa, by people walking through Europe and by border guards and fences. This article examines the broader visual environment within which EU policy-making took place from October 2013 to October 2015. It identifies ‘tragedy’ as the key term used by the EU to explain its actions and decisions and points out that discourses of humanitarianism and border control were both in place. The article provides a theoretical account of how humanitarianism and border control might be visualized by news photography. Adopting a multi-method design and analyzing a dataset of more than 1000 photos, the article presents a visual discourse analysis of five generic iconic motifs and a quantitative visual content analysis of shifts and continuity across four moments in time. The article connects these visual analyses to the policies and discourses of the EU holding that the ambiguity of the EU’s discourse was mirrored by the wider visual environment.

欧洲难民危机通过图像传达出来，例如通过躺在海滩上死去的艾伦·库尔迪（Alan Kurdi）的图像，在兰佩杜萨港口前部的尸体袋，穿越欧洲的人们以及边防人员和围栏传达的信息。本文研究了2013年10月至2015年10月欧盟决策所依据的更广泛的视觉环境。它确定了“悲剧”是欧盟用来解释其行动和决定的关键术语，并指出了人道主义和边界讨论控制都到位。本文提供了有关新闻摄影如何可视化人道主义和边界控制的理论说明。采用多方法设计并分析超过1000张照片的数据集，本文介绍了五个通用标志性主题的视觉话语分析，以及四个时间点上的变化和连续性的定量视觉内容分析。这篇文章将这些视觉分析与欧盟的政策和话语联系起来，认为欧盟话语的歧义反映了更广泛的视觉环境。